I have been thinking about law school for some time but feel a little intimidated by all the stories that center around how freakin hard it is. My somewhat diffuse question is basically: how hard is law school compared to undergrad? Is it a lot more stressful and a lot more difficult to make good grades? I don't mind working hard, but I don't think going to law school is worth it for me if it means being overly stressed out for 3 years, not having time to see family and friends, having nightmares about the bar etc.

Also, is it necessarily more difficult to be in the 50th or so percentile in your class at a top 6 school (HYS CCN) or can it be just as hard at schools further down the ranking? I'm thinking that if you are at a lesser known school you might have to work even harder because your job prospects are limited?

A friend of mine at a top 6 said something like: "The secret is to get in. People here are not necessarily smarter or study more than people at school x (a top 30 school). We just took the LSAT seriously and now that we are in we can relax because we know that 95% of us will get good jobs." To what extent is this true? Please share your thoughts and don't forget to include what schools you go to.

I dunno, how smart are you? It's harder than undergrad if you majored in literary deconstruction, not so much if you majored in math.

I go to a T6, and I wouldn't say people are relaxed, exactly, because a lot of people want not just a job but a fancy Vwhatever job. Personally though, I definitely went through 1L with the attitude of "I'll do my best, but if it turns out I suck, hey that's why you come to a top school." But not everyone has the career goals for that kind of attitude; I wasn't looking at top firms even when I had the grades for them.

The fact that whether you want to go to law school depends on how hard it is is more concerning to me. Do you want to be a lawyer or not?

Protip: Your law school experience is 100% based on how you handle stressful/uncertain situations and risk. I'm a moderately hard worker, but my trick is that I also rarely get stressed out about anything, especially school. Meanwhile, people who surely are smarter than me and work harder than me do much worse than me because they are uptight and neurotic from day 1. If you handle yourself well, focus on learning the material, and ignore outside pressures, law school is easy stuff.

Here's how I operated:

1. Spend the entire weekend ( for me that was Friday, most of Saturday, and most of Sunday) doing all of the reading for the entire week, or at least 3/4 classes. Going out in the evenings is OK too, but try to pace yourself so you can finish the readings before Monday.2. If you follow Step 1, you have the entire week without any reading. Sleep, watch TV, skim some hornbooks, and have a relaxing schoolweek. 3. Start putting your notes into an outline at your own pace. I usually started ~1 month before the start of finals.

That's it. Stress-free and easy. I never pulled all-night reading sessions or anything because all my stuff was done for the week already. I also had time to do pretty much whatever I wanted to do through the whole year (except maybe a couple 3-4 day periods surrounding writing assignments where things picked up a little). For me, this meant that while I certainly read more than undergrad, my free time was not substantially different.

When it comes down to it, the concepts you learn in law school are really not difficult. The difficult part is the collective stress that seems to surround all law students. Remove yourself from the stress, know the rules, write well, and dominate. Easy peesy.

I think the difficulty of 1L year is only in a small part because of the actual material. Most of it has to do with the ridiculous timeline legal employment is on, and the curve that is associated with law school grading:

Let's assume you want to work for a law firm when you graduate.

The law firm you work for when you graduate is almost always determined by the law firm you did your 2L summer with.

You get that 2L summer job based off an interview process in the fall of your 2L year.

Therefore, they only have your 1L grades. Therefore, only your 1L grades really matter at all.

Yes, the material can be super tricky, and the exams can be super difficult. But, because your 1L grades are so damn important, there is so much pressure to do well.

And, if that's not enough, you cannot simply "work hard and know the material and do well because I'm really smart." It does not matter how well you do on an exam, it matters how well you do compared to everyone else.

You could get a 99 on a test, but if everyone else gets a 100, you get a C.

You could get a 50 on a test, but if everyone else gets a 49, you get an A.

So at 8PM on a Tuesday, when you've finished all your work or whatever for the next day, you always know that there's some guy in the top floor of the library who will be there till midnight every damn day of the week. And that guy isn't alone. There is always pressure that somebody everybody is working harder than you.

Although it's FAR from necessary to gun the shit out of the semester in order to do well, the curved grading system just gives a lot more pressure to a standard studying routine.

tl;dr: The material isn't harder than anything you've probably done, even though it can be very difficult at times. But the legal hiring schedule and the curved grading system add all sorts of pressure to 1L year.

PennBull wrote:I think the difficulty of 1L year is only in a small part because of the actual material. Most of it has to do with the ridiculous timeline legal employment is on, and the curve that is associated with law school grading:

Let's assume you want to work for a law firm when you graduate.

The law firm you work for when you graduate is almost always determined by the law firm you did your 2L summer with.

You get that 2L summer job based off an interview process in the fall of your 2L year.

Therefore, they only have your 1L grades. Therefore, only your 1L grades really matter at all.

Yes, the material can be super tricky, and the exams can be super difficult. But, because your 1L grades are so damn important, there is so much pressure to do well.

And, if that's not enough, you cannot simply "work hard and know the material and do well because I'm really smart." It does not matter how well you do on an exam, it matters how well you do compared to everyone else.

You could get a 99 on a test, but if everyone else gets a 100, you get a C.

You could get a 50 on a test, but if everyone else gets a 49, you get an A.

So at 8PM on a Tuesday, when you've finished all your work or whatever for the next day, you always know that there's some guy in the top floor of the library who will be there till midnight every damn day of the week. And that guy isn't alone. There is always pressure that somebody everybody is working harder than you.

Although it's FAR from necessary to gun the shit out of the semester in order to do well, the curved grading system just gives a lot more pressure to a standard studying routine.

tl;dr: The material isn't harder than anything you've probably done, even though it can be very difficult at times. But the legal hiring schedule and the curved grading system add all sorts of pressure to 1L year.

And it becomes especially difficult when you recognize that, due to the luck involved in exam-taking and the degree of natural skill one has at law school, a skill that is impossible to gauge or predict until you've actually taken some law school exams, you can't even just out-study people. You might be able to perform very well despite not putting in the hours, or you might be the poor schmuck who works until midnight every night and will still not do well because your classmates "get it" and you just don't. The skills required to do well in law school are largely arbitrary, and the parts you do have control over are subject to the same curved, competitive controls that PennBull is talking about.

That's not to say it's pointless to put in a lot of work, because obviously there's still a curve and some like between effort and outcome. It's to say that law school is difficult because a lot of what determines your success is out of your control, and what is in your control involves a lot of work to beat out your classmates, most of whom will also be working hard (but not necessarily smart).

Bildungsroman wrote:And it becomes especially difficult when you recognize that, due to the luck involved in exam-taking and the degree of natural skill one has at law school, a skill that is impossible to gauge or predict until you've actually taken some law school exams, you can't even just out-study people. You might be able to perform very well despite not putting in the hours, or you might be the poor schmuck who works until midnight every night and will still not do well because your classmates "get it" and you just don't. The skills required to do well in law school are largely arbitrary, and the parts you do have control over are subject to the same curved, competitive controls that PennBull is talking about.

That's not to say it's pointless to put in a lot of work, because obviously there's still a curve and some like between effort and outcome. It's to say that law school is difficult because a lot of what determines your success is out of your control, and what is in your control involves a lot of work to beat out your classmates, most of whom will also be working hard (but not necessarily smart).

Yeah, definitely a good addition to what I wrote.

Not to turn this into a "how to do well" thread, but there definitely is a huge difference between working hard and working smart. I don't mean to insinuate that you must work until midnight every night. But, I think it is so, so critical to know from Day One the shit that's worth studying and the shit that simply isn't even worth thinking about. The poor schmucks studying till midnight and do poorly are often the ones who are studying the useless shit until midnight instead of the more essential materials.

Recognizing what material is essential and what material is useless is another very difficult part of law school.

Bildungsroman wrote:And it becomes especially difficult when you recognize that, due to the luck involved in exam-taking and the degree of natural skill one has at law school, a skill that is impossible to gauge or predict until you've actually taken some law school exams, you can't even just out-study people. You might be able to perform very well despite not putting in the hours, or you might be the poor schmuck who works until midnight every night and will still not do well because your classmates "get it" and you just don't. The skills required to do well in law school are largely arbitrary, and the parts you do have control over are subject to the same curved, competitive controls that PennBull is talking about.

That's not to say it's pointless to put in a lot of work, because obviously there's still a curve and some like between effort and outcome. It's to say that law school is difficult because a lot of what determines your success is out of your control, and what is in your control involves a lot of work to beat out your classmates, most of whom will also be working hard (but not necessarily smart).

Yeah, definitely a good addition to what I wrote.

Not to turn this into a "how to do well" thread, but there definitely is a huge difference between working hard and working smart. I don't mean to insinuate that you must work until midnight every night. But, I think it is so, so critical to know from Day One the shit that's worth studying and the shit that simply isn't even worth thinking about. The poor schmucks studying till midnight and do poorly are often the ones who are studying the useless shit until midnight instead of the more essential materials.

Recognizing what material is essential and what material is useless is another very difficult part of law school.

That's what I was trying to say. The guy studying all night in the library is not very good at differentiating between the two. Or he just really, really likes the library.

For each class, you will cover approximately 500 pages through the semester + any supplemental reading that you choose to do. The only evaluation of your knowledge will likely be a 3 hour exam at the end of all of this. Obviously, that exam can only cover so much. The trick is to figure out what your exam will cover and only focus on that. I don't think there's any way to learn how to do that. You just have to be good at understanding the teacher and the big picture of the class (the forest from the trees, so to speak). That should enable you to ignore a lot of the unimportant nitty gritty. If you're good at that, law school shouldn't be too difficult.

Law school is as easy as can be if you get how to take exams right away. Learn that skill (which is ridiculously hard for a lot of people), and you'll do fine. I blew my first semester exams up. I ended up getting screwed a bit second semester (a MC exam boned me pretty bad), but I still did *well* above median and ended up well into the top 10% at my current school.

I didn't understand the material more than most others. I knew how to manipulate the material into exam answers better than most others.

I don't think I really learned how to do it, either. It kind of came naturally. And I think it's like that for a lot of people out there.

I do want to be a lawyer (that's why I want to go to LS) but all the horror stories here at TLS make me wonder if it's really worth it. I want to be a lawyer but not at any cost.

How smart am I? Not sure. Which one is a better indicator of success GPA or LSAT?

BaiAilian2013 wrote:I dunno, how smart are you? It's harder than undergrad if you majored in literary deconstruction, not so much if you majored in math.

I go to a T6, and I wouldn't say people are relaxed, exactly, because a lot of people want not just a job but a fancy Vwhatever job. Personally though, I definitely went through 1L with the attitude of "I'll do my best, but if it turns out I suck, hey that's why you come to a top school." But not everyone has the career goals for that kind of attitude; I wasn't looking at top firms even when I had the grades for them.

The fact that whether you want to go to law school depends on how hard it is is more concerning to me. Do you want to be a lawyer or not?

I already hate the curve everyone is talking about. Does it only exist to prevent grade inflation?

PennBull wrote:I think the difficulty of 1L year is only in a small part because of the actual material. Most of it has to do with the ridiculous timeline legal employment is on, and the curve that is associated with law school grading:

Let's assume you want to work for a law firm when you graduate.

The law firm you work for when you graduate is almost always determined by the law firm you did your 2L summer with.

You get that 2L summer job based off an interview process in the fall of your 2L year.

Therefore, they only have your 1L grades. Therefore, only your 1L grades really matter at all.

Yes, the material can be super tricky, and the exams can be super difficult. But, because your 1L grades are so damn important, there is so much pressure to do well.

And, if that's not enough, you cannot simply "work hard and know the material and do well because I'm really smart." It does not matter how well you do on an exam, it matters how well you do compared to everyone else.

You could get a 99 on a test, but if everyone else gets a 100, you get a C.

You could get a 50 on a test, but if everyone else gets a 49, you get an A.

So at 8PM on a Tuesday, when you've finished all your work or whatever for the next day, you always know that there's some guy in the top floor of the library who will be there till midnight every damn day of the week. And that guy isn't alone. There is always pressure that somebody everybody is working harder than you.

Although it's FAR from necessary to gun the shit out of the semester in order to do well, the curved grading system just gives a lot more pressure to a standard studying routine.

tl;dr: The material isn't harder than anything you've probably done, even though it can be very difficult at times. But the legal hiring schedule and the curved grading system add all sorts of pressure to 1L year.

Palavra wrote:I do want to be a lawyer (that's why I want to go to LS) but all the horror stories here at TLS make me wonder if it's really worth it. I want to be a lawyer but not at any cost.

How smart am I? Not sure. Which one is a better indicator of success GPA or LSAT?

Neither are good indicators.

Just study your ass off for the LSAT, and get a good enough score so that you can go to either a.) a school that costs VERY little, or b.) a very highly ranked school that has very good employment prospects even if you don't finish in the top half of your class. (of course, if you can combine both of those, that's the best scenario to be in).

So you have to guess what material will be tested? This seems risky. I can see myself being that person staying in the library all night just to make sure I have covered everything.

PinkCow wrote:

PennBull wrote:

Bildungsroman wrote:And it becomes especially difficult when you recognize that, due to the luck involved in exam-taking and the degree of natural skill one has at law school, a skill that is impossible to gauge or predict until you've actually taken some law school exams, you can't even just out-study people. You might be able to perform very well despite not putting in the hours, or you might be the poor schmuck who works until midnight every night and will still not do well because your classmates "get it" and you just don't. The skills required to do well in law school are largely arbitrary, and the parts you do have control over are subject to the same curved, competitive controls that PennBull is talking about.

That's not to say it's pointless to put in a lot of work, because obviously there's still a curve and some like between effort and outcome. It's to say that law school is difficult because a lot of what determines your success is out of your control, and what is in your control involves a lot of work to beat out your classmates, most of whom will also be working hard (but not necessarily smart).

Yeah, definitely a good addition to what I wrote.

Not to turn this into a "how to do well" thread, but there definitely is a huge difference between working hard and working smart. I don't mean to insinuate that you must work until midnight every night. But, I think it is so, so critical to know from Day One the shit that's worth studying and the shit that simply isn't even worth thinking about. The poor schmucks studying till midnight and do poorly are often the ones who are studying the useless shit until midnight instead of the more essential materials.

Recognizing what material is essential and what material is useless is another very difficult part of law school.

That's what I was trying to say. The guy studying all night in the library is not very good at differentiating between the two. Or he just really, really likes the library.

For each class, you will cover approximately 500 pages through the semester + any supplemental reading that you choose to do. The only evaluation of your knowledge will likely be a 3 hour exam at the end of all of this. Obviously, that exam can only cover so much. The trick is to figure out what your exam will cover and only focus on that. I don't think there's any way to learn how to do that. You just have to be good at understanding the teacher and the big picture of the class (the forest from the trees, so to speak). That should enable you to ignore a lot of the unimportant nitty gritty. If you're good at that, law school shouldn't be too difficult.

Palavra wrote:I already hate the curve everyone is talking about. Does it only exist to prevent grade inflation?

I'm believe that the curve exists because of tradition, just like everything else in law school. Long after its functionality has ceased, we continue to use it because law schools are terribly resistant to change.

Palavra wrote:So you have to guess what material will be tested? This seems risky. I can see myself being that person staying in the library all night just to make sure I have covered everything.

PinkCow wrote:

PennBull wrote:

Bildungsroman wrote:And it becomes especially difficult when you recognize that, due to the luck involved in exam-taking and the degree of natural skill one has at law school, a skill that is impossible to gauge or predict until you've actually taken some law school exams, you can't even just out-study people. You might be able to perform very well despite not putting in the hours, or you might be the poor schmuck who works until midnight every night and will still not do well because your classmates "get it" and you just don't. The skills required to do well in law school are largely arbitrary, and the parts you do have control over are subject to the same curved, competitive controls that PennBull is talking about.

That's not to say it's pointless to put in a lot of work, because obviously there's still a curve and some like between effort and outcome. It's to say that law school is difficult because a lot of what determines your success is out of your control, and what is in your control involves a lot of work to beat out your classmates, most of whom will also be working hard (but not necessarily smart).

Yeah, definitely a good addition to what I wrote.

Not to turn this into a "how to do well" thread, but there definitely is a huge difference between working hard and working smart. I don't mean to insinuate that you must work until midnight every night. But, I think it is so, so critical to know from Day One the shit that's worth studying and the shit that simply isn't even worth thinking about. The poor schmucks studying till midnight and do poorly are often the ones who are studying the useless shit until midnight instead of the more essential materials.

Recognizing what material is essential and what material is useless is another very difficult part of law school.

That's what I was trying to say. The guy studying all night in the library is not very good at differentiating between the two. Or he just really, really likes the library.

For each class, you will cover approximately 500 pages through the semester + any supplemental reading that you choose to do. The only evaluation of your knowledge will likely be a 3 hour exam at the end of all of this. Obviously, that exam can only cover so much. The trick is to figure out what your exam will cover and only focus on that. I don't think there's any way to learn how to do that. You just have to be good at understanding the teacher and the big picture of the class (the forest from the trees, so to speak). That should enable you to ignore a lot of the unimportant nitty gritty. If you're good at that, law school shouldn't be too difficult.

Well that's your other option. Good luck with that though. Come test time when you have 3 hours to try to sift through a semester's worth of knowledge and you've studied everything you might have a difficult time.

My 2 cents: It isn't hard, per se (huh..huh...huh...he said it isn't hard... huh.. huh...) but it is hideously stressful because the lack of feedback means that you have no effing idea if you are doing it right (huh...huh..huh... he said "doing it"...) until, realistically, 1L is over.

Palavra wrote:I have been thinking about law school for some time but feel a little intimidated by all the stories that center around how freakin hard it is. My somewhat diffuse question is basically: how hard is law school compared to undergrad? Is it a lot more stressful and a lot more difficult to make good grades? I don't mind working hard, but I don't think going to law school is worth it for me if it means being overly stressed out for 3 years, not having time to see family and friends, having nightmares about the bar etc.

Also, is it necessarily more difficult to be in the 50th or so percentile in your class at a top 6 school (HYS CCN) or can it be just as hard at schools further down the ranking? I'm thinking that if you are at a lesser known school you might have to work even harder because your job prospects are limited?

A friend of mine at a top 6 said something like: "The secret is to get in. People here are not necessarily smarter or study more than people at school x (a top 30 school).We just took the LSAT seriously and now that we are in we can relax because we know that 95% of us will get good jobs." To what extent is this true? Please share your thoughts and don't forget to include what schools you go to.

Thanks guys.

The bolded is somewhat overstated. Just because someone scored a 177 doesn't necessarily mean they took the LSAT more seriously than someone that scored lower. There are lots of things that go into the LSAT that can improve scores.Multiple re-takes, money on courses, money on tutors, access to material, other test takers giving advice, time to prepare, time between taking the test and applying, age, test anxiety, standardized test taking ability, additional work load/responsibilities.

All of these reasons and many more can explain why two people with completely different LSAT scores could both be good students at the same school or both be average students at the same school. Law school exams are not like the LSAT. So when you ask if it's more difficult to be in the top 1/2 of your class at a Top 6 school versus a lower ranked school, the answer, probably not, but not for reasons you may think.A person with the grades/LSAT that got into HYS wouldn't have necessarily found it easier to be in the top 1/2 of the class if he had decided to attend a T2. That is of course one of the biggest draws to the very top schools--even if you're in the bottom 1/2 you're probably still doing ok. Schools in lower ranked bands can also be much harsher on grades and have much lower curves, which means more students with relatively lower GPAs. But a law school GPA is really only an indication of how you did at one particular school with a particular grouping of people. Although, people who fail to grasp the law school exam format in a way that prevents them from being at least 'in the middle of the pack' at any particular law school probably would not do well at any law school, since the format of law-exam taking is somewhat consistent. Conversely, someone with a high GPA at a high ranking school would not have necessarily received the same high GPA at a lower ranking school. The law school admissions metrics just don't correlate that well to actual law school success.

Palavra wrote:I have been thinking about law school for some time but feel a little intimidated by all the stories that center around how freakin hard it is. My somewhat diffuse question is basically: how hard is law school compared to undergrad? Is it a lot more stressful and a lot more difficult to make good grades? I don't mind working hard, but I don't think going to law school is worth it for me if it means being overly stressed out for 3 years, not having time to see family and friends, having nightmares about the bar etc.

Also, is it necessarily more difficult to be in the 50th or so percentile in your class at a top 6 school (HYS CCN) or can it be just as hard at schools further down the ranking? I'm thinking that if you are at a lesser known school you might have to work even harder because your job prospects are limited?

A friend of mine at a top 6 said something like: "The secret is to get in. People here are not necessarily smarter or study more than people at school x (a top 30 school).We just took the LSAT seriously and now that we are in we can relax because we know that 95% of us will get good jobs." To what extent is this true? Please share your thoughts and don't forget to include what schools you go to.

Thanks guys.

The bolded is somewhat overstated. Just because someone scored a 177 doesn't necessarily mean they took the LSAT more seriously than someone that scored lower. There are lots of things that go into the LSAT that can improve scores.Multiple re-takes, money on courses, money on tutors, access to material, other test takers giving advice, time to prepare, time between taking the test and applying, age, test anxiety, standardized test taking ability, additional work load/responsibilities.

All of these reasons and many more can explain why two people with completely different LSAT scores could both be good students at the same school or both be average students at the same school. Law school exams are not like the LSAT. So when you ask if it's more difficult to be in the top 1/2 of your class at a Top 6 school versus a lower ranked school, the answer, probably not, but not for reasons you may think.A person with the grades/LSAT that got into HYS wouldn't have necessarily found it easier to be in the top 1/2 of the class if he had decided to attend a T2. That is of course one of the biggest draws to the very top schools--even if you're in the bottom 1/2 you're probably still doing ok. Schools in lower ranked bands can also be much harsher on grades and have much lower curves, which means more students with relatively lower GPAs. But a law school GPA is really only an indication of how you did at one particular school with a particular grouping of people. Although, people who fail to grasp the law school exam format in a way that prevents them from being at least 'in the middle of the pack' at any particular law school probably would not do well at any law school, since the format of law-exam taking is somewhat consistent. Conversely, someone with a high GPA at a high ranking school would not have necessarily received the same high GPA at a lower ranking school. The law school admissions metrics just don't correlate that well to actual law school success.

2012JayDee wrote:A person with the grades/LSAT that got into HYS wouldn't have necessarily found it easier to be in the top 1/2 of the class if he had decided to attend a T2. That is of course one of the biggest draws to the very top schools--even if you're in the bottom 1/2 you're probably still doing ok. Schools in lower ranked bands can also be much harsher on grades and have much lower curves, which means more students with relatively lower GPAs. But a law school GPA is really only an indication of how you did at one particular school with a particular grouping of people. Although, people who fail to grasp the law school exam format in a way that prevents them from being at least 'in the middle of the pack' at any particular law school probably would not do well at any law school, since the format of law-exam taking is somewhat consistent. Conversely, someone with a high GPA at a high ranking school would not have necessarily received the same high GPA at a lower ranking school. The law school admissions metrics just don't correlate that well to actual law school success.

There is some data and analysis to suggest otherwise.

While it is mostly anecdotal, the T14 kids I know would almost certainly be top half of my T2's class. A significant of my class should never have been let in to any law school.